In the news

Cutting-​​Edge Tech Gives A Synthetic Voice To The Voiceless

September 13, 2013

Until now, every person who uti­lized the tech­nology has had the same voice — which sounds deep and com­put­er­ized. But thanks to VocaliD, that’s changing.

“You see a 3-​​year-​​old girl using that voice, and then you see a 40-​​year-​​old male using that voice, and it’s odd. It can’t really be an exten­sion of the indi­vidual if someone else has that same voice,” Rupal Patel, asso­ciate pro­fessor at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity and the devel­oper behind VocaliD told The Huff­in­gton Post. “That was when we first started thinking: ‘Isn’t there a way to make these voices more personalized?”

Patel uses tech­nology to blend a person’s unique speech with a healthy speaker’s voice to create a sound that is “under­stand­able but unique to the person that we want to build it for.”

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“This is an exciting and unex­pected dis­covery that ques­tions the stan­dard par­a­digm in the field,” Kim Lewis, director of the Antimi­cro­bial Dis­covery Center at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity not involved with the […]

Last year, for instance, the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion reported that it took twice as long to fill sci­ence, tech­nology, engi­neering, and math, or STEM, jobs as non-​​​​STEM posts. Mean­while, aca­d­e­mics like […]

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